COURSE OVERVIEW

Modelling financial analysis, reporting and budgeting is based on three important pillars: the technical understanding of these topics, the quality of the data inputs and the tools used to build, customize and expand these models. This intensive 5-days course is primarily focusing on the last point with reference to the first two. It is not about the budgeting process, as much as what to do so that your budgets get structured, analysed and reported with the most sophisticated dynamic dashboard visualizations ever.
The course will focus on two important tools for these purposes, namely, Power Pivot and Power BI. The presenter is widely known in the region as the black-belt champion as far as these topics are concerned. You are guaranteed the best training experience ever. A fresh graduate once attended this event and her exact words were: “.. it led me to develop a full interactive database and now almost every financial report is done through it”. Just to mention again, she was a fresh graduate. That is the magic of this course.
Here is a brief of these topics and how they can shape your decision-making process:

Power Pivot: a company doesn’t have its entire database in one table. Imagine a tool that allows you to interrelate all of these tables having millions and millions of rows. Best, this tool is 100% functioning inside of Excel, so you get the full benefit of the data manipulation power of Excel and the database management system of Power Pivot. The tables can be warehoused anywhere: Oracle, Access, SQL, and of course Excel; still all of them will be connected. End result? Most sophisticated queries from your management can be answered by a click of a button; no more ad-hoc requests that take days to prepare and check. To cite a simple example, how much is the Year to Date (YTD) sales in this division by this salesperson compared to the budgeted number vs last year performance. On top, dynamic charts and tables will form your dynamic dashboard based on the controls you determine. The catch? You will have to learn a new language called DAX (Data Analysis Expression) which was introduced by Microsoft particularly to work inside of Power Pivot and Power BI, extremely powerful and extremely useful. You will love it going from nowhere, all the way to master this language in these five days among other topics. This is the new ego of financial professionals globally. It has to penetrate deeply in our region. Previous attendees are now called the superstars in their respective companies.

Power BI: think of it as the new blockbuster of Microsoft. This tool was introduced for free in September 2015, very new and very smart. The dashboards you always dreamed to establish are now at your fingertips. Microsoft crafted this new tool to substantially cater for all the requests that analysts and budget professionals were demanding over the years. It is as significant as the migration from DOS to Windows, for example. This whole area is called Business Intelligence (BI). If you are not in this game double quickly, you are running the risk of being obsolete in the market sooner than you think. We will start from scratch all the way to developing a practical budgeting and analysis model for a manufacturing company. Some people think that this field is the responsibility of IT professionals. This is very untrue; it is the prime responsibility of finance professionals. They are the ones who understand the financial data and the interrelationships between them. Upon the completion of this course, you will be able to create models that will dazzle the decision makers in your company. Companies spend millions of dollars in their BI applications and end up using “the free” Power BI for its advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) features available to end users. For example, Saudia Airlines has obviously spent tremendous amount of money on its Database Management System, yet when they started using Power BI, the analytical power of the company and the resulting efficiency savings increased sharply. Please visit Youtube and search what the CFO of Saudia said about Power BI. You will love this tool. Conclusion: these advanced tools are indispensable in terms of financial analysis, reporting and budgeting. By using PowerPivot and Power BI, you can analyse data in ways that go way beyond “regular Excel” and regular Pivot Tables. You can get more done in less time. Never underestimate their power and never overestimate their difficulty given the way the presenter will conduct the training.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Master advanced Excel tips in building dynamic financial models

Apply the various forecasting and smoothing techniques

Create dynamic and professional budgets in Excel and use the consolidate command

Start using the Monte Carlo Simulation in Excel

Change your data handling to the extremely powerful Pivot Tables

WHO SHOULD ATTEND?

Financial Analysts

Chief Financial Officers
Budgeting and planning specialists

Accountants

Financial government officials

Marketing officers

Insurance specialists and actuarists

Credit analysts

Treasury

Internal auditors

Corporate finance analysts

Risk managers

Investment bankers

Strategic planners

Compliance officers

Management consultants

Bank lending officers

CERTIFIED BUDGET ANALYST CERTIFICATION

The International Academy of Business and Financial Management™ is one of the world’s fastest growing professional associations with more than 200,000 members, associates and affiliates in 145 countries. IABFM™ hosts and organizes certification training worldwide and offers exclusive board designations to candidates who meet the highest professional standards and assessment criteria.
The IABFM is credited by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) the International Standards setting authority.